Slavery in The Spanish New World Colonies - Spanish Enslavement of Africans

Spanish Enslavement of Africans

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) recorded the effects of slavery on the Native populations. Following what many of his contemporaries were suggesting, he acquiesced to the Crown's decision to replace Natives with imported African slaves. Its counselors insisted on a source of labor to develop Caribbean plantations. However, he later spoke against African slavery as well once he saw it in action.

In 1502 the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, granted permission to the colonists of the Caribbean to import African slaves. Opponents cited the weak Christian faith of the Africans and their penchant for escaping to the mountains. Proponents argued that the rapid decline of the Native American population required a consistent supply of reliable workers. The Spanish population at the time was far too low to carry out all the labour needed to assure the economic viability of the colonies. The first years of Spanish presence in the Americas were marked by an outbreak of a tropical epidemic flu; it decimated both the native and Spanish populations. In 1518 the first shipment of African-born slaves was sent to the West Indies. The Spaniards chiefly purchased the slaves from the Portuguese and British traders in Africa. They did not engage directly in the trade and overall imported fewer slaves to the New World than did the Portuguese, British or French.

The Spanish used enslaved Africans as workers to develop their agriculture and settlements. They also used them in defense of the colonies. Originally the Crown relied on private initiative and resources to protect colonial shipping and settlements. In some cases, colonists hired out their slaves or donated them for this purpose; in other cases, the Crown bought the slaves. Building forts and defense works relied on slave labor, but most were privately owned.

The slave populations were extremely low on Cuba and Puerto Rico until the 1760s, when the British took Havana, Cuba, in 1762. After that, the British imported more than 10,000 slaves to Havana - a number that would have taken 20 years to import on other islands. They used it as a base to supply the Caribbean and the lower Thirteen Colonies. This change is almost directly related to the opening of Spanish slave trade to other powers in the 18th century. Spain and Great Britain made a contract in 1713, by which the British would provide the slaves. The Spanish outlawed its own slave trade of Africans.

Historians have studied the production of sugar on plantations by enslaved workers in nineteenth- century Cuba, and have sometimes overlooked the crucial role of the Spanish state before the 1760s. Cuba ultimately developed two distinct but interrelated sources using enslaved labor, which converged at the end of the eighteenth century. The first of these sectors was urban and was directed in large measure by the needs of the Spanish colonial state, reaching its height in the 1760s. The second sector, which flourished after 1790, was rural and was directed by private enslavers involved in the production of export agricultural commodities, especially sugar. After 1763 the scale and urgency of defense projects led the state to deploy many of its enslaved workers in ways that were to anticipate the work regimes on sugar plantations in the nineteenth century. Another important group of workers enslaved by the Spanish colonial state in the late eighteenth century were the king's enslaved laborers who worked on the city's fortifications.¹

The Spanish colonies were late to exploit slave labor in the production of sugarcane, particularly on Cuba. The Spanish colonies in the Caribbean were among the last to abolish slavery. While the British colonies abolished slavery completely by 1834, Spain abolished slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1866. On the mainland of Central and South America, Spain ended African slavery also in the eighteenth century. Peru was one of the countries that revived the institution for some decades after declaring independence from Spain.